You know, “The” Christmas story, “God born a man in a
manger”, and all that, escapes some moderns. Mostly I think because they seek
complex answers to their questions, and this one is so utterly simple. So for
the cynics and the skeptics and the unconvinced, I submit a modern parable.
Now the man to whom I’m going to introduce you was not a
scrooge, he was a kind, decent, mostly good man. Generous to his family,
upright in his dealings with other men, but he just didn’t believe all that
incarnation stuff which the churches proclaim at Christmas time. It just didn’t
make sense, and he was too honest to pretend otherwise.
He just couldn’t swallow the Jesus story about God coming to
earth as a man.
“I’m truly sorry to distress you”, he told his wife, “but
I’m not going with you to church this Christmas eve”. He said he’d feel like a
hypocrite, that he’d much rather just stay at home, but that he would wait up
for them. So he stayed and they went to the midnight service.
Shortly after the family drove away in the car, snow began
to fall. He went to the window to watch the flurries getting heavier and
heavier and then went back to his fireside chair and began to read his
newspaper. Minutes later, he was startled by a thudding sound, then another, and
another; sort of a thump or a thud. At first, he thought someone must be throwing
snowballs against his living room window, he thought. But, when he went to the
front door to investigate, he found a flock of birds huddled miserably in the
snow. They had been caught in the storm and in a desperate search for shelter,
had tried to fly through his large landscape window.
Well, he couldn’t let the poor creatures lie there and
freeze, so he remembered the barn where his children stabled their pony. That
would provide a warm shelter if he could direct the birds to it. Quickly, he put
on a coat and goulashes, tramped through the deepening snow to the barn.
He opened the doors wide and turned on a light. But the
birds did not come in. He figured food would entice them in. So he hurried back
to the house, fetched some breadcrumbs, sprinkled them on the snow making a
trail the yellow lighted, wide open door to the stable. But to his dismay, the
birds ignored the breadcrumbs and continued to flop around helplessly in the
snow. He tried catching them. He tried “shooing” them into the barn by walking
around them waving his arms. Instead, they scattered in every direction except
into the warm lighted barn.
Then he realized that they were afraid of him. To them, he
reasoned, I am a strange and terrifying creature. If only I could let them know
that they can trust me; that I’m not trying to hurt them, but to help them, but,
how? Because any move he made tended to frighten them, confuse them. They just
would not follow. They would not be led, or “shooed” because they feared him.
“If only I could be a bird”, he thought to himself “and
mingle with them and speak their language. Then I could tell them not to be
afraid. Then I could show them the way to the safe warm ... to the safe warm
barn, but I would have to be one of them so they could see and hear, and
understand.”
At that moment the church bells began to ring. The sound
reached his ears above the sounds of the wind. He stood there listening to the
bells playing Adeste Fidelis. Listening to the bells pealing the glad tidings
of Christmas, he sank to his knees in the snow.
By Paul Harvey
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